ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS by Ocean Vuong

I had heard so much about this novel and put it off because, along with the sad subject matter (the world is sad, so get over it), I was warned you will read and then read again each sublime sentence before moving on to the next. Who’s got that kind of time? Make the time. Vuong is the kind of writer all writers secretly wish they could drink from the same cup of talent. He’s the kind of writer readers feel as if they’re in a dark movie theatre watching the scenes unfold—he’s that visual a storyteller. And a poet who has written a mesmerizing story of a Vietnamese American son writing a letter to his illiterate mother. It’s not written in epistolary form, but as a narrative of memory of Little Dog’s coming of age in the 1990s as a gay teenager raised by his mentally ill mother and grandmother in Hartford, Connecticut, and his rebirth as a young man who finds salvation in writing and books.

Favorite line(s): I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly. Like right now, how the sun is coming on, low behind the elms, and I can’t tell the difference between a sunset and a sunrise. The world, reddening, appears the same to me—and I lose track of east and west. The colors this morning have the frayed tint of something already leaving. I think of the time Trev and I sat on the toolshed roof, watching the sun sink. I wasn’t so much surprised by its effect—how, in a few crushed minutes, it changes the way things are seen, including ourselves—but that it was ever mine to see. Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

WHO IS MAUD DIXON by Alexandra Andrews

A One Brainer’s book club pick, Andrew’s vexing story of swapped identities did not disappoint. Think thriller in the vein of The Talented Mr. Ripley meets Gone Girl. Aspiring novelist Florence Darrow bolts her dead-end life in Florida for a job as a publishing assistant in New York City. Fired after a hookup at the company’s holiday party, Florence can’t believe her good luck when she’s soon hired as a personal assistant to best-selling author Maud Dixon. Dixon is a pseudonym (Elena Ferrante-like), and Florence is one of only two people who know her real identity. From NYC to rural New York to Marrakesh, the two keep flipping roles, and the reader is left rooting for one character only to switch allegiances in the next chapter.

Favorite line(s): There was a world beyond her world, Florence knew, that was entirely foreign to her. Every once in a while, someone took this other world in their hands and rattled it, dislodging a small piece that fell at her feet with a plink. She gathered up these fragments like an entomologist gathers rare bugs to pin to a board. They were clues that would one day cohere into something larger, she didn’t know yet what. A disguise; an answer; a life.

OBJECTS OF DESIRE: STORIES by Clare Sestanovich

A debut short story collection rife with the implausible ways young women, sisters, wives, and mothers examine what they’ve been given as opposed to what they’ve imagined their lives to be. Some of the eleven stories are snapshots of women wrestling with the reality of their bodies through fertility, birth, and loss. Memory and how trustworthy it is or isn’t is examined in a few others. Laced with humor and tender moments of recognition, Objects of Desire is like reading summaries of photographs of characters in their everyday life.

Favorite line(s): There were graver threats she might have worried about. Student debt and callous boys. Rising sea levels. But it was disappointment, most of all, that she feared for me. For a long time, her fear seemed like a form of doubt, maybe even an insult. Proof that she didn’t think I could weather the minor calamities that life had in store. I would have preferred, I thought, that she imagine me as a tragic victim—someone susceptible to plane crashes and sexual harassment. But she didn’t worry that I would die or be destroyed. She worried that I would crumple in the efface of everyday failures, that I would gradually deflate—a quiet, unremarkable hissing—into a case of unfulfilled potential.

FIGHT NIGHT by Miriam Toews

Another one of our book club selections, Fight Night explores the multigenerational relationship between Swiv, the nine-year-old narrator, her pregnant actor mother raging against her stolen happiness, and the grandmother who teaches the granddaughter lessons on how to stay and fight while remembering the people who didn’t. Told from mostly Swiv’s point of view in an ongoing letter to her absent father, Fight Night allows the reader to see the betrayals, joys, and despair of this family of women fighters from one generation to the next.

Favorite line(s): I hugged her so tightly then, in the lobby…I felt her bones. I was afraid I’d break them. We sat down on one of the couches. Those stupid couches that were so soft you couldn’t get back up. I knew she was suffering, so deeply sad, so lost and so afraid. She was sad, and she was afraid, but she wasn’t crazy, Swiv. I shouldn’t use that word, crazy, I know. She was fighting, fighting. She was fighting on the inside. Sometimes when we fight…sometimes we’re not fighting in quite the right way…we need to adjust our game. But still, the main thing is that we’re fighting…your mom’s a fighter. We’re all fighters. We’re a family of fighters. What can I say!